Crunchies Wrap Up – A Big Thank You To The Community

Thank you to everyone who attended the first Crunchies event last night to honor startups in categories ranging from “best business model” to “best time sink” (pictured right is Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic/Wordpress, showing off his award for Best CEO).

If you were not one of the 900+ people to attend the event live last night in San Francisco, you can watch a video of the entire event that Mogulus recorded here. People are still uploading photos, but you can see them on Flickr under the tag “2007crunchies.”

Congratulations to all of the winners, as well as all of the nominees. It is my honor to have covered most of them since they’ve launched, and to see how well they’ve done is awesome.

And thank you to our co-producers, GigaOm, ReadWriteWeb and VentureBeat. Having this be a multi-blog event was an important step, and shows how blogs can compete hard for stories and still come together to collaborate when it is good for the community.

Media Coverage

Lots of blog coverage continues to roll in. Mainstream media was also all over the event. Alice radio, which hosts the no. 1 local morning show, kicked things off with two on air mentions. ABC and Fox covered the show locally and ABC also covered it nationally during the 11 pm news (see video clips above). NBC also covered the event – we’re uploading clips now.

AFP here.
“Friday’s event was the first glitzy Internet start-up love-fest in San Francisco since the Webby Awards began here in 1996 during the famous dot-com boom.”

Highlights

The highlight of the event for me was the best gadget category. John Biggs from CrunchGear recorded an overview video that was a crowd pleaser (see video below).

Apple won the award for the iPhone. But we simply could not get anyone from Apple to attend and accept the award. Fake Steve Jobs stepped in and recorded a video accepting for them. I’ve seen the video at least a dozen times now, and laugh harder every time I watch it:

The live performance by the Richter Scales of their Here Comes Another Bubble song was another highlight. I wish we could have ended with them, but their schedule forced them to go very early in the show:

Thank You

Thank you to the sponsors of the 2007 Crunchies who are underwriting the event and making it possible to recognize outstanding contributions in our industry. Award Benefactors: Adobe, Charles River Ventures, The Founders Fund, The Mayfield Fund, Microsoft, Our Stage and Sun Microsystems. Thank you also to our Program Sponsors, including Ask, Framr (an ecommerce start-up offering custom picture framing, launching tonight), Lotus Vodka, Intel Capital, Lehman Brothers, Meevee, RealTimeMatrix’s Vortex, Searchles, our official live streaming partner of the night Mogulus, our official ticketing sponsor amiando, WeBreakStuff for design and MediaTemple for hosting.

And thanks as well to everyone who worked hard on the event from the participating blogs. In particular, Heather Harde, our CEO, put in a heroic effort to get everything in place moments before the event began, and the teams from all four blogs really pitched with multiple all-nighters the last couple of days in to make the night go well. Special thanks to video blogger Sarah Meyers for giving us three straight days of her time to work through all of the video work for the event.